January 2021 Newsletter

Happy New Year everyone! I hope all of you had a chance to recharge a bit over the holidays. I am sure I am not alone in feeling optimistic about 2021.

While we say goodbye to the tumultuous 2020 calendar year, I can say with pride that we tried to manage the challenges associated with the pandemic with grace and did our best to look after the health of the organization balanced with a benevolent view of our colleagues and our patients. We learned a lot from these challenges and have emerged from the chaotic year a stronger organization.

Looking forward, we are hopeful that the pandemic will wane as the population becomes vaccinated and look forward to our lives regaining some normalcy. We expect our services will be in high demand and we are planning for growth in 2021.

We are adding a field office manager to support the great work that Emily Marshall has led with our office operations. This role will help us better support our physicians and PAs in providing top of license care to our patients. It will also allow us to better implement our policy and procedures with greater precision, enhance our training, and allow us to implement and test best practices within our offices.

The additional office management resource will relieve our Nurse Supervisors of some duties in the medical offices so that they too can better support our physicians, nurses, techs, and patients on the Endoscopy side of the house. I want to give a shout out to Laura and her team as well for their resiliency and commitment to clinical excellence and safety! They have rallied throughout the pandemic to assure our patients and colleagues were looked after. We are also excited that Laura has hired 2 new nurse supervisors to her team for 2021!

Great strides have also been made with our IT stability and system integrations. Seemingly, the field is recognizing greater performance reliability with all applications and hardware—i.e., printers, network stability, applications. Behind the scenes Lynn led an effort to integrate our pathology reports with endoscopy reporting and our practice management system. This has resulted in a more streamlined communication bundling of our patient encounters with our referral sources and our payors.

Also, in early 2021, expect us to modernize and enhance the sophistication of our website and digital presence. This will include updated website platform, formatting and patient facing content. This project will enhance our digital brand with patients and referral sources while achieving greater analytics about our customers.

In summary, I am excited and optimistic about 2021. Let us continue to be diligent with our infection control and COVID 19 safety policies. Let us do our part to bring the pandemic to an end and I hope everyone who wants the vaccine gets the vaccine. Let us be kind to one another and let us continue to get better every day.

Sincerely,

Jason Richardson

CEO

Gastroenterology of the Rockies